Claudette Colbert

Claudette Colbert was a French-born American actress whose career in Hollywood spanned six decades, from late silent films through the screwball comedy era and into television. Equally adept at sophisticated comedy and serious drama, she became one of the highest-paid stars in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s.

She was born Émilie Claudette Chauchoin on September 13, 1903, in Saint-Mandé, just outside Paris, the daughter of banker Georges Chauchoin and Jeanne Loew. The family emigrated to New York City in 1906. She studied at Washington Irving High School and the Art Students League, intending to become a fashion designer before drifting into amateur theatre.

After her Broadway debut in 1923 she signed with Paramount Pictures in 1928. In 1934 she appeared in three notable films: Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra, John M. Stahl's Imitation of Life, and Frank Capra's It Happened One Night, opposite Clark Gable, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress.

She received further Academy Award nominations for Private Worlds (1935) and Since You Went Away (1944) and continued in films including Midnight (1939), The Palm Beach Story (1942), and Three Came Home (1950). From the 1950s she worked on stage and in television, earning a Tony nomination for The Marriage-Go-Round in 1959. She died on July 30, 1996, in Speightstown, Barbados, aged 92.

Her name Claudette derives from the French feminine diminutive of Claude, from Latin Claudius meaning "lame." Claudette became fashionable in France in the early twentieth century and entered English-speaking use through cinema.